Head of a Google think tank gets technical at Princeton U

Michael MancusoAn aerial view shows the Princeton University athletic facilities, located in Princeton Township, and beyond, the bulk of the campus in Princeton Borough.

By Alice Su

PRINCETON BOROUGH — Jared Cohen first noticed the impact of social technology in 2004, when he was conducting research for his Rhodes scholarship in Iran and saw young people using Bluetooth to coordinate underground parties.

“You can’t understand international relations without also understanding technology and where it’s going,” said Cohen, the director of a new think tank started by Google. “The relevance of technology to every single challenge we face, whether for good or for ill, is only becoming more significant in every aspect of our lives.”

“These young people are using technology in ways that the engineers in the West who designed them never imagined, to organize to do things they’re not allowed to do by law or by norm,” Cohen said during a talk at Princeton University Wednesday. “They’re literally self-training in civil society activism without even realizing it.”

In addition to heading the Google Ideas think tank, Cohen is an adjunct fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He was previously a member of the U.S. Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff in both the Bush and Obama administrations.

Since his time in Iran social technology has become a game changer for citizens and states.

“Just because physical individuals are constrained by borders and by some of the challenges they face locally, does not mean their ideas are,” Cohen said. “Just because revolutions used to start in private doesn’t mean they won’t completely unfold in public in real time.”

He cautioned that technology is an “equal opportunity enabler” for good or for hurt. Technology could lower the barriers of entry to terrorism, for example, but also raise the risks of engaging in it, he said.

“If you think about the last 10 years, we went from bin Laden in a cave to bin Laden in a mansion in Abbottabad with hard drives, thumb drives, and CDs,” Cohen said. “It used to be that Special Forces go into a house and arrest a terrorist leader. Now they arrest a terrorist leader, get his SIM card and get the entire network.”

States will face a new challenge, Cohen said, in discerning when and how to react to social unrest in the virtual world.

“The regime of the future is going to have to decide what they should not overreact to and what they should treat as just online noise,” Cohen said, “That challenge of figuring out what’s noise and what’s real is what’s going to trip regimes up.”

Eventually nations will need to adjust their policies to accommodate both virtual and physical worlds, he said. Technology will not only shape the policies but also create an entirely new global social contract.

“States are still going to dominate the international system, but they’re going to be kept in check in ways we’ve never seen before,” Cohen said, “On top of that will be this global social contract where all states are grappling with similar issues, all citizens are grappling with certain issues, and as a collective they keep each other in check.”